Weight Watchers

A lovely night of walking

2009-09-22T05:00:00Z

Today, I learned that Inigo really, really likes frogs. I went to Weight Watchers (lost 0.3 kg which negates half of the last two weeks) and managed to only stick my foot in my mouth once. Then, getting home an hour later than normal, I decided that as much as I wanted to play on the computer, I'd go on a walk.

One and a half hours later, I'm tired, Inigo is tired and staring hopefully at every. single. dark. spot. on the trail hoping it is a frog. I managed to walk just under four miles, which isn't too bad. I wasn't in a hurry or anything.

I also enjoyed thinking about My Father's Bike, which is the novel-like thing I'm working on. I finally sat down and got a chapter outline set up for the thing and I'm a bit happier about it.

Didn't do much beyond thinking about it though, I'm planning that for tomorrow. Tonight, I only had an hour or so, so I decided to mess around with a Emacs major mode for ASH, the scripting language used by KoLmafia. Kind of fun, but still a challenge. And it gave me some new insights on how to improve csharp-mode, which is one of those things I really need to polish up a bit more.

The good, the obsessed, and the wordy

2009-07-07T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss (6.4 of 14.7 kg)

Commission (0 of 15,000 words)

Petition #3 Responses

I'm excited and worried at the same time. My weigh-in for Weight Watchers was... good. Actually, a bit too good so I'm worried that I won't be able to lose weight tomorrow because of some quirk. Came out to almost 3 kg in a week. This reverses the weight gain in the two weeks before and then some, but I'll have to be extra focused on walking fast, getting some excercise, and eating healthy. I'm 0.45 kg from my next star and 0.91 kg from losing 5% of my initial weight at Weight Watchers.

Fluffy is out of town for a few days, so I get to enjoy obsessing at home. This week, I'm planning on working on my third college petition feedback and then the commission due in a week or so. The commissioner is anxious to get it and I really want to see how the story turns out. It is probably one of the largest ones I've done from someone else's idea, so this is going to be a challenge. While I can write fifteen thousand word stories, I do better with less than that.

My "sweet spot" for short stories is five to ten thousand words. That is where at least 90% of everything I write for myself falls into. Naturally, it is larger than most of the places looking for short stories which makes it harder to find places to submit.

Not that schedules impact writing at all *cough*, but the ten thousand mark is also the largest story I can reasonably write in a single evening. I have to be really into the story, dreaming and thinking about it constantly, but sitting down after work until bed time, I get just under four hours. Naturally, that times goes into Fluffy, animals, and housework also, but when she's out of town, I write more.

Imagine that.

Happily moving forward

2009-06-16T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss (4.8 of 14.7 kg)

College Petitions (2 of 4)

MfGames CIL (2 of 22 tasks)

There is something to be said about hearing the weight loss for the entire room and getting ten percent of it. Lost about 0.8 kg last week, mostly I suspect from happily obsessing about programming and playing games that I forgot to eat. That means this week will be even harder because I need to maintain the weight loss into next week.

Found a neat feature on my tracking system for Moonfire Games. It lets me see the progress toward a release. Since I was hoping to do a MfGames CIL release this weekend, I decided to put in all the tasks that I need to complete and use that roadmap to show my progress. It is in the progress bar, for those who are interested.

It looks like a lot, at first, mainly because I didn't enter what I completed. But, my major goals this week are to work on the petition and get MfGames CIL out the door. As soon as I get this release off my progress reports, then I'm planning on switching back to a writing project. I have two commissions sitting on my plate now and one of them is due in three weeks.

A pound lighter...

2009-05-05T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss (1.7 of 14.7 kg)

College Petitions (1 of 5)

Commission (0 of 10,000 words)

We changed our weigh-in day to Mondays and, I'm very happy to say, I managed to lose another 0.6 kg. That puts me at 16.3% of my goal of 14.7 kg, which is making me rather happy since I'm still heading in the right direction.

Today is also the first day that Fluffy won't be home when I get there. I have to actually go out on that walk with my own willpower instead of looking forward to spending an hour talking with her.

I'm hoping to get to programming or writing this week. I have been happily distracting myself with working on the new Moonfire Games site and I'm planning on getting all the projects and everything mapped over. This uses Doku Wiki for the CMS and I'm enjoying it pretty well. Needs a bit of love on the fonts, but that is, relatively speaking, a minor thing.

Later this week, I'm going to start working on my commission and hopefully the petitions. And, mowing the lawn for the first time in ten years.

Joys!

Small steps

2009-04-29T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss (1.7 of 14.7 kg)

College Petitions (1 of 5)

Commission (0 of 10,000 words)

Got my official weigh-in yesterday and it wasn't the prettiest thing the world. Actually, it was barely a weight loss at 0.1 kg, which is the smallest amount they measure. Well, 0.2 pounds, but I don't like that system. There were a few things I did wrong. Fluffy seems to think that me not eating enough is contributing to the slow weight loss, and she might be right. I have been struggling all week to actually eat my full points. Normally, I'm shy 5-15 points a day out of my 44. I just get obsessed with work and, well, forget to eat. That and we took the new guy out for chicken wings about three hours before I weighed in.

So, this next week, I'm going to behave much better. I swear! We are also moving our weigh-in day to Mondays, not because of the chicken wings, but Fluffy's new job starts Tuesday nights. Actually, it looks like she's basically on second shift for the length of this job. We are both nervous about it, but I have faith that it will work out in the end. It also means that we are going to cram "together" time on Sunday and Monday nights.

I also stayed up late last night to reformat my laptop, which always takes twice as long as I think it would. But, it now has a brand new XFS file system and will let me write stories/novels upstairs with Fluffy instead of down in my "man cave". I need to rewrite at least three outlets to make this happen properly, a lot of two prog ones, but I'm getting nicely down the getting settled path. After that, I have a MythTV box to move up stairs, a remote to get working with videos, and moving the boxes out of the garage.

An exciting time, right now, filled with a great wide plain of opportunities. And doors. Hundreds upon thousands of doors spread out before us. I'm kind of cheerful about that.

As a side note, Fluffy reminded me to just "not be depressed".

Commissions, BooGame, hardware, and creativity

2009-04-20T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss: 14.7 kg (32.4 lbs)

College Petitions (1 of 5)

Got an email out of the blue last night about BooGame. It was a simple question of "can I do this", but it also got me excited about working on the project again. Like writing, I always work better when someone is going "ooh, how pretty!" Call it vanity, but I write for audiences. It doesn't matter if it is programming, literary, or research reports.

(Side note, I'm going to use the official Weight Watchers weigh-in on Tuesdays to update the progress bar on the top. It is there to annoy me and remind me that I have something hanging over my head.)

I got distracted in the last few months from BooGame and the rest of my projects. Plus, just a general blah when it came to writing which I highly suspect was writer's block. I did write stuff, mostly commissions, but there is a strange thing in that I can write on demand very well, but I can't always come up with my own ideas. With commissions, I get the idea in paragraph form, so the "hard" part is already done. All I have to do is make beautiful words.

Though, while I'm experiencing writer's block, I have to schedule my writing instead of relying on the obsessive need to pound words into the keyboard all hours of the day. I miss that, when it happens, but I have 12d6 worth of Obsessive powers.

Speaking of commissions, I got a really nice compliment from my latest commission. You know, the usual "you do fantastic work" and "I don't think other authors could treat this topic so well". Yes, it isn't entirely true I'm that awesome, but still. It helps my ego swell by three sizes for reading them. It is like not getting a rejection letter from a publisher. True, only one person is probably going to read it. Well, the hordes of anonymous people once I sanitize the names, but it was written for a single person who loved it because they got exactly what they wanted. Knowing that I'm writing what they want, even though the topic is not my own, makes me feel proud. I can write well without having a strong emotional attachment to it.

That's passing now. My commission "season" is pretty much over at this point and my creativity is coming back because my life isn't as chaotic. Given that, I think I'm going to focus on BooGame for a little bit. Knowing someone is interested will drive me to finish and maybe I can get another chunk done before life hits me in the head again.

I've had a very busy weekend. I got my new drives (two 1.5 TB), cables, and memory sticks. I upgraded a bunch of machines, got my MythTV back-end working, but not the front-end. I also split out my Windows and my Linux machines into two separate machines which involved reading a 54 digit number over the phone three times to get it reactivated. But, it should make life a bit more stable when it comes to do school and business work. Not to mention it gave me room on the Linux machine to put in the second 1.5 TB drive as my new /home partition. Mmm, space.

I also worked on the new theme for Moonfire Games website. It is bright and cheerful, with more white than the old one, but I think it is also easier on the eyes to read. Well, except the font which needs to be seriously looked at again. This is also a pure XML/XSL stylesheet. If it works out, then I can make a generic "theme" for the site and use client-side XSL to format it; might make life easier.

Remarkably, I also manage to exercise every day except for Saturday. MiL took us on a "short" walk of 30 minutes. Damn that lady walks fast, but it also means I have a lot to go before I can catch up. I'm trying to get at least 4 activity points (another Weight Watchers thing) a day and then move it to 5 and maybe 6 at some point. We'll see if I'm making a small step toward weight loss tomorrow. Here's hoping.

Diabetes, MythTV, and world-building

2009-04-16T05:00:00Z

Weight Loss: 14.7 kg (32.4 lbs)

Rough night, mainly because I kept thinking too much. Stupid little things that keep you up. I call it my monkey, a little chattering thing that won't shut up so I can go to sleep. Fortunately, not everything was negative, just... loud.

Obviously, the main thing was the whole weight and diabetes thing. My doctor is test-happy, so I limit any blood work to every few months unless it is an emergency. So, I have two months or so to get glucose and weight down. No problem, in Weight Watchers, my first goal is 10% anyways. It was also my goal at the beginning of the year, but I didn't have a good idea of my weight then. Three months ago, the doctor's office said I weighed about 151 kg. According to WW, the scale said 147 kg. So, I already lost about 4 kg, if all those scales are right. I'm going to use the 147 kg point and say I need to lose 14.7 kg in the next few months. I won't get upset if I don't make the 14.7, but I will if I don't make at least half that (5% goal) of 7.4 kg.

It's a plan. I managed to get used to eating half a gallon of vegetables every day for lunch, I can get used to 30-60 minutes of exercise a day.

I was also thinking about the MythTV box. I decided to migrate the hardware to a slightly slower machine (Pentium D 2.8 GHz to a AMD x64 3800+ at 2.0 GHz). It allows for more RAM (4 instead of 1 GB) and it's 64-bit which should help with encoding. That and it's rated higher than the Pentium. I ordered a new 1.5 TB drive for the file storage (and another 1.5 TB for my "personal" computer). I'm enjoying getting it working, but with everything else, it just takes time to get it done and I'm impatient.

I also got a new mailbox yesterday. Forgot the address already, but I really like having a postal box for my writing. With commissions and everything, I've always been uncomfortable with people knowing my home address. I also post my address on-line, for that strange day when someone might want to send me fan mail. Yes, the mailbox place (also a UPS Store like last time) knows it, but it offers a bit of veil for my on-line presence. I'll start changing my various on-line addresses, like domain records and such, over the next few weeks. It may only be temporary, since I don't know where we'll get the non-rental house, but it at least gives me something.

Finally, Fedran and religions. This is actually the fun topic, since I'm trying to show historical progression and change of various religions as they mix, fold, and separate over the centuries. I wanted to have denominations, not unlike this country, where every church has a slightly different view on things. Fortunately for me, a co-workers wife is going to seminary so I got a really good view of what she is going through to become a preacher, including the different types of relationships between a pastor and a church. Coupled with years of listening to my Roman Catholic friends, my experiences in random religions, and everything else, I think I finally have a good handle on how I want religions to work in this fantasy world.

It also lead into how I want to show history in the world. On my wiki site, I'm building up the various countries and everything as my working notes. If I ever get a book published, that is the point where I'll worry about backward consistency so everything is still mud-like right now. But, I could create a little SVG file of the continent and use that to show snapshot influences of a religion over time. So, I can show where Tirmol started and how to expanded over the years until the wars with Devmas which eventually lead to the religious truce of that became the Divine Marriage. And the fracturing later which will give me the God-King split and all those other denominations.

In my head, it's all pretty. Now, to see if I can make the website match and actually be informative.

I wish I had more discipline for updating the wiki and keeping the continual world-building going. I might now that things are settling, but I honestly feel that the reason my other world works is because I spent years building up the world. I wrote stories, ran games, and even made up little comics in that world. Not all at once, but layering idea after idea on top of it until I had such a wonderful place to write in. And, like wine, it had the influences of my ideas at the times, which changes constantly.

Well, I'm excited and creating today, despite everything.